‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: “Suspicious Minds”

Back at the beginning of the Lincoln Lawyer’s latest ride (Season 2, Episode 1: “The Rules of Professional Conduct”), Mickey Haller took a haymaker to the face, and blood spattered all across the sleek matte finish of his Navigator. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said in a voiceover. “The parking garage? Again?” It was a reference to last season, which began with a lawyer associate of Mickey’s being shot dead in a garage very much like the one in which Mickey was being whaled upon. And now, as the first five-episode block of the series concludes, we’re back in the garage watching Mickey get owned. He’s just had a very bad day in court with the Lisa Trammell case, Henry Dahl’s meddling has him at wit’s end, and worst of all, Lorna has told him to go fuck himself. How did we get here? And who were those goons who beat the shit out of Mickey? 

Maybe, as he was lying bloodied and beaten, staring up at the concrete ceiling, he was thinking about the delicious flan at Lisa’s restaurant. That’s where “Suspicious Minds” (Season 2, Episode 5) begins, with a daydream of his once romantic partner, now a defendant in a murder case kissing caramel off his lips. He quickly comes back down to earth, and tells Lisa about Andrea Freeman dropping the plea deal and hinting that she has new evidence. But Lisa gets testy when he brings up Jeff, her ex-husband. Mickey really wants to find him, and perhaps get him on the stand as a character witness for Lisa. Because the opposite, if Freeman finds him and puts him on the stand for the prosecution, that could be another very bad thing for the defense. Eventually, Jeff actually calls Mickey, with the sounds of Ensenada and the Baja surf crashing in the background. “I’d rather not get dragged into her drama, if you catch my drift,” he says of his ex, and refuses to testify before hanging up. The saga of Jeff, Lisa’s stoner ex-husband, still lingers. 

Mickey’s crafty legal skills fire up for preliminary hearing in People Vs. Lisa Trammell. He wants to paint the prosecution’s chief witness, the receptionist at Mitchell Bonderant’s office, as unreliable, and that’s exactly what he does. Did she really see Lisa walking away from Bonderant’s office building on the morning of his murder? Could she really be sure it was the chef? What about all of the parked cars blocking her view? The maneuver is a success, and the witness’s testimony is stricken. But then – classic Lisa! – she tells Mickey that she really was in front of Bonderant’s building that morning. Oops, she forgot that detail; maybe she was daydreaming of licking flan off Mickey, too. With this case, and seemingly since the moment he met Lisa, every little victory leads to a different kind of defeat. 

Cisco’s static with his pal Kaz and the Road Saints has come to a head. “Lay low,” he warns Kaz. “It’s going down tonight. Do not go anywhere until this is over.” And when an ATF/LAPD tactical team raids the MC clubhouse looking for guns, all they find are teddy bears and toys. The real gun shipment’s getting delivered by Cisco to Teddy at an undisclosed location. And the Saints president seems satisfied with the transaction. “Kaz saved your ass. This is you saving his.” And Cisco, with the help and support of Lorna, uses an old forger contact of Mickey’s to secure a new passport and driver’s license for Kaz. “Cisco did what he did because he felt he owed you,” Lorna tells her fiance’s old pal, and Kaz says maybe he did. “Maybe,” Lorna agrees. “But that’s done now.” And she never wants to see him hanging around Cisco again. 

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When he isn’t conducting secret weapons deals with biker gangs, Cisco is impersonating a fish and wildlife investigator in order to flush out Alex Grant, aka Alex Kazarian, the construction contractor Bondurant was probably extorting. But while his ruse uncovers the address to his condo building, Kazarian hasn’t been seen around there in days. Someone tipped him off, Mickey and Cisco agreed. He’s in the wind, making it hard to get him to testify. Lisa’s case is piling up the L’s, and Mickey hasn’t learned the worst of it. After his move to strike the receptionist’s testimony, Andrea Freeman returned to court with a new witness, the forensic investigator who analyzed the evidence taken from Lisa’s residence. Evidence like a pair of garden gloves that Mickey never saw in the discovery materials. “We found epithelial cells and hair follicles,” the forensic analyst reports, and the gloves have a bloodstain that also matches Mitchell Bonduran. In a case that’s been going bad for days, this is the worst news yet. 

But it can always get worse! Lisa continues to plead her innocence, but becomes angry when Mickey seems to reveal that he doesn’t believe her. “Now I’m just a client to you?” she shouts, which goes back to those conflicts of interest we’ve been talking about – of course she should just be a client, right? Nevertheless. Lisa’s defiant in her innocence and angry with Mickey, who’s in his office trying to craft another legal slam dunk when Izzy sends him a link. “Developer murder getting limited series treatment from podcaster Henry Dahl.” Dahl’s selling Lisa’s story to television, even after Mickey showed him the contract she signed authorizing only Mickey to control her life rights. He’s angry, frantic, and calls Lorna to accuse her of misplacing the only copy of that contract. He makes unfair accusations. He says she’s too busy planning her and Cisco’s wedding. And Lorna isn’t going to stand for this kind of abuse. “Go fuck yourself, Haller!” 

But here’s the thing about that contract. When Mickey first met Henry Dahl, he pulled it out of the file box in the back of his Navigator and taunted the podcaster with it. Dahl even said, “Oh, is that why they call you the Lincoln Lawyer?” And while Mickey said at that time he’d provide Dahl with a copy, apparently that never happened. What has happened is this. That contract is now missing from the folder in the Lincoln. And Mickey is standing there being pissed about that when the goons appear to hand him his ass. Dahl has been up to something since the beginning. Did he hire the muscle? Did Kazarian? Could Henry have swiped the contract so as to gain control of Lisa’s life rights? And what would the chef know about that? Mickey will have to determine the answers to those questions when The Lincoln Lawyer returns in August for the second half of its latest season. But his first order of business better be to apologize for yelling at Lorna.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges